accounting for managed investment accounts

[David T.]

Carl, 

I, for one, was confused by your post, which seems to have multiple issues in it. 

Regarding the managed account: at one point you state you want to treat this as a "black box" into which you have no desire or need to see. Then you go on to reference all sorts of "seeing" you need to do. If the account truly is a black box, then treat it just like a mutual fund--or even a savings account, where the fund manager or banker decides what investments to make, and pays you money in the form of interest or dividends. You record only those transactions that affect the overall balance of your account. But perhaps there actually is more?

I have no idea what the multiple currency point is, and I don't know how or whether trading accounts will affect things, as I don't use either.

As for your own stock holdings, it seems to me that your holdings in individual stocks would likely require you to track them as stocks. For me, that whole "tax" thing essentially requires that I track them individually, so that Uncle Sam (in my case) can get his piece...

David


________________________________
 From: "gnucash.133518b at telus.net" <gnucash.133518b at telus.net>
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org 
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2014 8:34 PM
Subject: Re: accounting for managed investment accounts
 

No help from the GnuCash community? If creating a GnuCash account for a 
managed investment account is not actually possible, then perhaps 
someone can recommend alternative accounting software that can?

Carl

On 2014-04-28 12:33 AM, gnucash.133518b at telus.net wrote:
> Imagine I have a real-world personalized professionally-managed
> investment account of the sort often referred to in Canada as a "managed
> account" or "discretionary account". I am not consulted on the buying
> and selling of the assets and cash within the account. As this is not a
> mutual fund, my external transactions with this account are in dollars,
> not shares. Similarly, my tax consequences relate to external
> transactions with this account, not transactions that are internal to
> the account.
>
> I want to add a corresponding investment account created in my GnuCash
> book, but how do I do this? I don't think I can use either of the
> "stock" or "mutual fund" account types because those appear to be
> strictly denominated in share units. The number of different assets in
> the managed account are too many and too often changing for me to want
> to try tracking them individually in GnuCash and the whole point of such
> an account is to manage it as a (more or less) black box.
>
> After reading Peter Selinger's well-known "Tutorial on multiple currency
> accounting" as well as "8.7 Selling Shares" in the GnuCash Tutorial and
> Concepts Guide I have a very tenuous understanding that realized
> gains/losses need to be accounted for with investment accounts. It is
> not clear to me from my reading why it is that when tracking individual
> stocks that one must always manually calculate and enter profits for
> individual stock sale transactions such that they are sourced by an
> Income:Capital Gains account but that this does not also apply to
> currency exchange transactions. Assuming someone can tell me how I can
> even implement my managed account in GnuCash, how do I account for its
> realized gains?
>
> For unrelated reasons I will have trading accounts enabled. How does
> this changes things, if at all?
>
> I also have a variety of loose investment assets within a real-world
> portfolio account I manage on my own. I am not yet sure that I want to
> track those individually as stocks in GnuCash either, but I at least
> need to account for them as a group, so I think this would be pretty
> much the same thing as the managed account. It seems to me this would be
> an approach that a lot of people would go for if someone could give us
> an easy-to-understand description of how to accomplish this sort of
> thing correctly.
>
> In case it wasn't already painfully obvious, keep in mind that I am
> totally new to GnuCash and accounting concepts in general.
>
> Carl
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